"Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" eBook

At first the schools pass into the Straits of San
Juan. Here the joint fleets of British Columbia
and of Puget Sound begin to harry them. A week
or ten days later the vanguard will be off Nanaimo.
And in another week they will be breaking water like
trout in a still pool around the rocky base of the
Ballenas Light and the kelp beds and reefs of Squitty
Island.

By the time they were there, in late April, there
were twenty local power boats to begin taking them,
for Jack MacRae made the rounds of Squitty to tell
the fishermen that he was putting on a carrier to take
the first run of blueback to Vancouver markets.

They were a trifle pessimistic. Other buyers
had tried it, men gambling on a shoestring for a stake
in the fish trade, buyers unable to make regular trips,
whereby there was a tale of many salmon rotted in waiting
fish holds, through depending on a carrier that did
not come. What was the use of burning fuel, of
tearing their fingers with the gear, of catching fish
to rot? Better to let them swim.

But since the Folly Bay cannery never opened until
the fish ran to greater size and number, the fishermen,
chafing against inaction after an idle winter, took
a chance and trolled for Jack MacRae.

To the trailers’ surprise they found themselves
dealing with a new type of independent buyer,—­a
man who could and did make his market trips with clocklike
precision. If MacRae left Squitty with a load
on Monday, saying that he would be at Squitty Cove
or Jenkins Island or Scottish Bay by Tuesday evening,
he was there.

He managed it by grace of an able sea boat, engined
to drive through sea and wind, and by the nerve and
endurance to drive her in any weather. There
were times when the Gulf spread placid as a mill pond.
There were trips when he drove through with three
thousand salmon under battened hatches, his decks
awash from boarding seas, ten and twelve and fourteen
hours of rough-and-tumble work that brought him into
the Narrows and the docks inside with smarting eyes
and tired muscles, his head splitting from the pound
and clank of the engine and the fumes of gas and burned
oil.

It was work, strain of mind and body, long hours filled
with discomfort. But MacRae had never shrunk
from things like that. He was aware that few
things worth while come easy. The world, so far
as he knew, seldom handed a man a fortune done up
in tissue paper merely because he happened to crave
its possession. He was young and eager to do.
There was a reasonable satisfaction in the doing,
even of the disagreeable, dirty tasks necessary, in
beating the risks he sometimes had to run. There
was a secret triumph in overcoming difficulties as
they arose. And he had an object, which, if it
did not always lie in the foreground of his mind,
he was nevertheless keen on attaining.

The risks and work and strain, perhaps because he
put so much of himself into the thing, paid from the
beginning more than he had dared hope. He made
a hundred dollars his first trip, paid the trollers
five cents a fish more on the second trip and cleared
a hundred and fifty. In the second week of his
venture he struck a market almost bare of fresh salmon
with thirty-seven hundred shining bluebacks in his
hold. He made seven hundred dollars on that single
cargo.